It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

The very first computer game I played was Zork I on the Apple II. While the era of text-based adventure games is over, the art of interactive fiction is still holds a magical appeal despite the billions of polygons and realistic physics of today's games.

Once the family got a PC clone, I played almost all of the text-based Zork series, as well as other Infocom gems like Planetfall, Spellbreaker, and A Mind Forever Voyaging.

So it brought a smile to my face to see the Zork 404 page. I know it's not new, but it's the first time I've run across it in my many years surfing the web practically every day.

I'm still a button masher

I finally got around to playing the PS3 demo of NHL '09, and it reminded me why I don't buy sports games. Sure, it's gorgeous and has great commentary by Gary Thorne and Bill Clement. But despite missing plenty of classes in college playing NHL '94 on the SNES, now, as then, I'm a button masher. That means I often get owned by the CPU because I can't master the finer mechanics of the game, and that makes it not-so-fun.

Looking at some videos of NHL '94 vs. '09, it's amazing how far the graphics, artwork, and animation have come. In some respects, it's getting almost photorealistic, but every few seconds, wooden animations and bad texture mapping jarred me back to reality. As far as the demo, I didn't manage a win in several attempts to play through the demo's final period of a Penguins/Red Wings game, so no chance of me picking up this title.

Unfortunately, besides confirming that my mashing skills are intact, I've got the song from the demo, "Warriors of Time" by Black Tide, firmly stuck in my head. Woah, woah, woah...

(Bleep)ing Stripped PS3 Screws!

Armed with a new 320GB Hitachi drive, a small Phillips screwdriver, and a great step-by-step guide, I went about upgrading the 60GB Seagate Momentus 5400.2 hard drive in my Playstation 3. What should have been a 4-minute hardware swap ended up being more like 20 minutes thanks to a stripped screw on the drive carrier.

Yes, the guide warned that the screws are easy to strip, but I think these screws were easier to strip than 20-year old paint (or use your imagination). As careful as I was, one of them stripped with only slight pressure. I ended up using a pair of pliers to grip the sides of the screwhead to loosen it. If that didn't work, I would have had to break out the rotary tool to cut the damn thing off.

Aside from the screw, the upgrade was fast and easy, including the backup, restore, and formatting. My PS3 now has a ton of space and an empty partition for Yellow Dog Linux (grumble about the 10GB fixed partition size limitation--gotta either pick 10GB for one OS and the other gets the rest of the drive).

Anyway, given the tons of money in components that the PS3 has, you'd think Sony would have spent, oh, a few more cents on some hardier screws on the only user replaceable part in the unit.

PixelJunk Eden

Not that the PS3 needs more eye candy, but a title that has that and more is PixelJunk Eden. A download title from the PlayStation Store, it's a gorgeous puzzle platformer with a great techno/chillout soundtrack. It's kind of hard to describe but IGN and 1Up have done a good job explaining the premise of the game.

I've downloaded the demo, and as soon as I get my PS3's hard drive upgraded, it will be the first downloadable title that I'll buy. Even the wife was fascinated by Eden, and she's not really into console or action games. Check out a video of the action to get an idea why it is such a unique title--and a bargain at $10.